Live agents for the NHS test-and-trace operation who are being paid £9.50 an hour have been outsourced to Government vendor Serco at as much as £21.50 an hour.
The rate hike was charged by UK call centre firm Sensée for contact centre staff tasked with calling Britons who had tested positive for Covid-19, a source told The Guardian.
Neither Serco nor Sensée disputed the figures when approached for comment.
Tim Sharp, the TUC’s senior employment rights policy officer, said: “This rate looks excessive and seems to go beyond the already-inflated rates of commission commonplace in the industry.
“Instead of just cashing in on the hard work of agency workers, recruitment agencies should treat their workers fairly and pay them properly. Too many agency workers face unpredictable hours, limited rights and low pay.”
Serco’s earning on the test-and-trace system was capped at 4% on top of costs for its test-and-test work. But its suppliers were not under the same obligation.
The test-and-trace system has a £37bn budget over a two-year period. This works out as approximately £550 for each person in the UK.
But the Government and its private suppliers provided little detail on how the money has been spent.
The £1.3bn budget for contact tracing included contracts worth £720m for 2020-21.
Serco hired as many as 24 employment agencies to find workers for its contact tracing system in the scramble to find the 18,000 workers required by the government.
Sensée said its rates were standard in the call centre industry and both firms added that large costs involved were swallowed up by the cost of technology, management, holiday, sickness and pensions, which are now mandatory.
It comes after the system was criticised for its efficiency after a number of blunders were reported over the past year of the rollout. Though the app has since improved.
RingCentral, a calling technology provider, in October said that many large call centre providers charged their clients rates of below £20 an hour for each worker.
A Serco spokesperson said: “Our sub-contractors providing contact centre services will incur a number of costs that are in addition to the wages paid to call handlers.”
Mark Walton, Sensée’s chief executive, said: “Our charge rates for outsourced work are competitive within the contact centre industry. If an employer was to employ contact centre advisers themselves, they would incur a wide range of other costs in addition to wages.”
